I’ve been hanging around with Barb Ash a lot. I published Sqinks. I painted quite a bit. I’ll break my doings into two posts: “Wandering” and “Wondering.”
Barb is a photographer, as am I, and we enjoy working on pictures together, each using their own camera, but helping each other see. Barb is better at focusing than I am. This is her shot of sunset at Moss Landing. We were down there for a whale watching trip, spending three nights while we were at it.
Made a visit to the Asian Art Museum in SF. I like this guy, he makes me laugh. D.T. Suzuki wrote a book called The Zen Doctrine of No Mind.
Amazing demon sculpture from, I think, Tibet.
Down in Santa Cruz with Barb, near the Boardwalk. I love the zigzag shadow.
Barb by the chimneys in Moss Landing. Looking kinda cyberpunk. This used to be a fuel-burning power plant, but now it isn’t. I think they do something having to do with solar power there.
I never tired of the living mandalas of yuccas and such succulents.
Asian art museum: Ganesh the elephant god. I’ve always loved this guy.
Halloween pumpkins with Barb. The one on the left is mine; I carve him the same every year.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. October, 2025
I love Peter Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, a fantastical and realistic masterpiece that shows about a hundred misshapen creatures tumbling down from heaven. I was working on my novel Sqinks, in which a zillion of odd aliens are swooping around. And I thought of Bruegel’s painting, and I tried to paint a copy of it for inspiration. Quickly I realized a precise copy would be far beyond my skills. So I went semi-abstract, and filled a canvas with gauzy figures in shades of green, pink, yellow, blue, and orange. One of the figures is indeed modeled on a specific Bruegel fallen angel. This one is halfway up of the left, and resembles a bursting ripe seed pod. I only outlined the figures in the lower part of the painting. I see those guys as the creatures who are allowed to remain in heaven, and the evicted ones are the gauzy figures in the upper half. You might think of them as farther away. And the red arc might be thought of as edge of a cliff, or the rim of a planet.
A pan shot of my office. I always have a bunch of my recent paintings on the walls. But I’m always making new ones so they don’t get to stay up all that long. I especially like that one in the middle.
Eye Candy. Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. June, 2025
This is based on a photo taken from a plane over the California region called the Delta. In this one, I was interested in the delicate gradations of yellow among the slightly different fields. And I emphasized the islands within the oxbows. To liven them the image, I filled the islands with circles. Wanting to make something that’s fun to look at. Eye candy! Somewhat foolishly, I painted over this a few weeks later, because I was desperate for a fresh canvas, and didn’t want to wait a week for a new one to arrive in the mail.
Mannequins in empty store windows are always creepy and surreal. Especially if they don’t have heads!
Att the annual St. Mary’s School Fair in Los Gatos. A saucer ride! I guess that once a bunch of people are inside, it spins around. Not for me! But I love the way it looks.
My Shadow. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″. July, 2025
Here I am in my studio, that is, in my parched back yard. It’s two in the afternoon of a full-on sunny day. Thei summer-nuked lawn is yellow clay, with dead straw and few green blades. I’m holding my phone camera with both hands, which is why you see my elbows sticking out. I’m photographing my lower legs, my shoes, and the dark shadow of my body. My pants have lots of paint on them. The articulation of the legs, shoes, and shadows is a bit tricky but, once you know what you’re looking at, it seems logical. At least to me. I have a PhD in an arcane field knows as Mathematical Logic. The other day I was talking with my friend Barb, and I was making some outrageous claim, and I insisted, “It’s simple logic.” And then I had to stop and think, and I admitted, “Well, it’s mathematical logic.” Which may not the average person’s notion of logic at all.
The source photo for My Shadow. Part of painting is learning what things to leave out.
I think this one of the greatest photos I ever took. With my Leica. Walking down a street on Bernal Hill, it might have been on the Fourth of July.
In Chinatown with Barb. We like hanging around in North Beach these days. We’ve found a cheap hotel with free parking, and we like to dance in the bar/club called the Saloon. Supposedly the oldest bar in San Francisco. They have good live music. I love these old guys playing their own instruments on Grant Street.
Rudy & Penny’s twins, Jasper and Zimry, set off for college this fall. I remember their baby hears and childhoods and teen years so well. And now I’m nearly eighty. How time rolls on.
Barb shot of me in North Beach. She doesn’t like to crop, and maybe she’s right. We like the hills and the Vic houses of North Beach. And of course I like the sone’s history as a beatnik / artist enclave.
What I call a “Rudy picture.” Shapes and silhouettes and 3D.
Another Rudy picture from North Beach. I like that little wall around the base of the tree.
Flukes of a whale on our whale watching trip to Moss Landing. We saw about 30 whales over a couple of hours, they were right offshore. I was rereading Moby Dick around this time, and I liked it in that book when one of the old whalers, before going to bed, says, “I’m going to turn flukes.” This would be an expression, you understand, for a whale diving down deep.
We spent a couple of nights near Point Reyes Station in a motel next to Tomales Bay. So peaceful.
Kawaii. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025
At one point, I had a nice square canvas, and a lot of fresh paint on my palette, so I decided to cover the blank canvas with lines. Initially the canvas was in a position where those lines were vertical. But then I rotated the canvas by ninety degrees so the lines were horizontal; and — aha! A sunset. I’d been wanting to paint an ocean sunset like I’d seen at Moss Landing, and here it was. But it didn’t have enough. It needed critters. I let the painting sit around the house for a couple of months until I could see…seals! I made mine simpler than life. Cute seals. For the title, I went for the Japanese word “kawaii,” which means something like cute, but in a special Japanese sense. I think it’s pronounced a little like “Hawaii.”
I was here just the other day. Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. I’d just been up at a tree farm with Rudy’s family, and we stopped at Lexington to make sure Rudy’s tree wasn’t going to slide off. Subsets…so obvious, so transcendent.
Rudy is interested in mushrooms, in a botanist kind of way, and here he’s using one as an umbrella. Up at the tree farm.
The tree meets its doom…or its elevation to iconic status!
This month we’re having a new retaining wall installed. Big, big job with many stages. Note the I-beams. I like this shot of the moon and, beneath it, the planet Venus.
Sawed-off tips of the “lags,” like railroad ties, which are to be stacked into the grooves on the sides of the I-beams.
With daughter Isabel on a hill above where we live.
Equipment for drilling the holes where the I-beams went.
Wedding With Cat. Acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 30″. November, 2025
One of my collectors, Julian Reschke, approached me with the proposal that I do a painting for his upcoming wedding to the woman he’d been living with for many years. We discussed possibilities, and he sent me some photos of him, his lady, and their one-eyed cat. I was eager to start work, but I didn’t have a blank 40″ x 30″ canvas. Rather than waiting for one to arrive by mail, I decided to paint over a recent work, Eye Candy, letting the green rivers become bodies. As I’m by no means a skilled portrait painter, I chose to model the faces on Picasso images. And I found a fun way to depict a one-eyed cat. I wasn’t sure if my friends would like the work, but they did.
Spring in November. Acrylic on canvas, 22″ x 28″. November, 2025
As I often do, I started my next work with abstract patterns drawn from the paints still on the palette from the previous work, that is, Wedding with Cat. . I had a lot of nice blues and greens, as if for a beautiful spring day with gentle skies and budding plants. And that was indeed the weather we were having just then, even though it was November. That’s California! I wanted something on top of that, so I drew dark lines in a kind of pictogram animal shape. I went over the lines three or four times until I got just the right colors and brightness. And then some flowers/eyes came it. I spent a last day refining the edges of the dark shape, making sure it didn’t run off the edges, or get too thick.
Isabel held an event at rudy Jr’s Monkeybrains headquarters in the Mission. Isabel and I were to be talking about the nature of time. And somehow Barb had a made a photo of a warped clock with a tossed potato in front of it…I think that’s Rudy’s hand. We have fun, our clan.
Rudy’s warehouse is another spot where I like to take photos. This is some electrical thingie that resembles a gnarly bug. I tweaked the perspective sliders to make sure the background lines are at right angles.